rekeeb.com

A collection of some links I found over the last two weeks.

A styllish animation on the how the credit crisis came to be
http://vimeo.com/3261363

The Skype Brand Book (also download as PDF)
http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-skype-brand-book

12 million people in USA still use dial-up
http://www.rlslog.net/12-million-people-in-usa-still-use-dial-up/

Privacy in the Age of Persistence
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/02/privacy_in_the.html

Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium (by C. Doctorow)
http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=171555&

LIFT Video’s 2009
Recommended: Matt Webb, David Rose(MIT Media Lab)
http://www.nouvo.ch/liftvideo

Fun: It’s Greek to Me
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/362-greek-to-me-mapping-mutual-incomprehension/

On Visualisation of Information (community of Information Visualisation)
http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

Augmented Reality
GE Ecomagination

http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

Twitter & Search
Twitter Search

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=kumo

Novel Text Input methods
Swype — swipe the letters to form words

http://www.swypeinc.com/

Dasher project — writing without keys
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

Just the other day I surprised myself. Generally I am a very un-original thinker, but somehow that day I was not. Let me share with you my ‘insight’. It relates, as the title indicates, to bloggers. Even if also this a blog and that makes me also a blogger, lets discard that fact for a moment since I consider myself a small and insignificant blogger writing mostly for myself.

Lets take the theory behind the ‘rise of the bloggers’ as the blogger who is seen somehow as the defender of the consumer. Like a modern re-make of Robin Hood. The typical large corporation communication is classicaly unidirectional and is not really open to any critique from people outside the mighty corporation. Along come the typical blogger and starts written about this typical corporation, giving his opinion about things he doesn’t really like about their products or services. So far so good. Blogging itself has gained considerable momentum and now even large corporation started blogging. Some people even got fired. Currently there is a complete range of blog-types: a corporate blog, a professional blogger, a verybadblog. My blog I voluntary place in the last category.

So what do I want to say? Well the thing I noticed the other day is the Animal farm-effect bloggers seem to have. Apart from the political charges the book contaings just the mere rise of the pigs is what I am referring to. They started as small and innocent good-willing bloggers criticising products and services which in their eyes could be improved. No problem so far. Truth rises up to the surface most of the time anyway; and I agree some times it can use some help. Somewhere along the road these small bloggers got more and more visitors. Probably on a BarCamp, the small and innocent bloggers with lots of visitors met other bloggers and exchanged some chit-chat:

Blogger A: Hi. How are you?
Blogger B: Fine, I like blogging and I have 50.000 visitors, and you?
Blogger A: I reaaaaaly digg blogging, I have a mere 30.000 visitors.
Blogger A + B: Lets be blogger friends? Yes, that sounds like swell(*) idea.

It most have been somewhere briefly after this meeting that this new friends (the bloggers) became arrogant and started taking over the role of the typical large corporations. Instead of their old role as parasites critising their hosts, they became hosts themselves: fat, arrogant and opaque.

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”.
Newton’s third law of motion, Newton 1687

Due to a lack of formal scientific scholastic training I have developed an interest towards do-it-yourself sciencebooks. That is books which explain scientific topics without their formal notations. Some time ago I ran into difficulties passing my last exams on the Politecnico di Milano. A course called ‘Tecnica delle costruzioni meccaniche’, in short it talks about beams, internal actions, and more. The real thing I would say. However this courses required a certain — but for me unknown — knowledge of Mathematics. The problem was born.

But I still I had to pass this exam, luckily my mechanics professor was willing to except my alternative approach. A friend of mine informed me about a book written by Prof. J.E. Gordon called Structures, or why things don’t fall down. This book talks about structures and mechanics with much less mathematics. The book reads like a novel and explains some basic concept about structures, cracks, and materials in a very concise way which much less mathematics.

Long story short: I studied this book and had an private exam. I passed gloriously. Problem solved and I’m happy. For anybody interested in these kind of books have a look at the following:

1. On Mathematics
Innumeracy, Mathematical Illiteracy and its consequences
John Allen Paulos, 1988, ISBN: 0679726012

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
John Allen Paulos, 1995, ISBN: 038548254X

The Number Devil – a mathematical adventure
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1997, ISBN: 0805062998

2. On Materials
The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don’t Fall through the Floor
J.E. Gordon, 1984, ISBN: 0691125481

3. On Mechanics
Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down
J.E. Gordon, 1978, ISBN: 0306812835

To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Henry Petroski, 1985, ISBN: 0679734163

Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to Figure Without Equations
Henry Petroski, 1986, ISBN: 0312077858

Walter Lewin (MIT)
About: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lewin
Some video’s: http://tinyurl.com/zov9w

Well I guess this title is not mine but but even so quite adaptable to the topic. Actually a very gifted and shy system administrator coined this phrase to me: who will guards the guards? At that time it already struck me. These days we are to trust in the smart, talented, somewhat strangely speaking technologists who govern some parts of this world. Obviously each field has its own technologists: mechanical engineers, electronic engineers, computer engineers, etc.

But sometimes we ought to ‘doubt’ these people who most of the times understand much mathematics better then me. Since more and more technology is pumped into our society thereby replacing some previously pure public controlled civil services. Today I read that some hackers (read:crackers) apparently have found a way to crack the public transport card currently in introduction in the Netherlands. A famous Dutch hacker has said some words on the matter (in Dutch). Basically he proposed together with other subject matter experts for more transparency and accountability in these topics. Hear, hear!

A last note ‘who guard the guards‘ has some Roman history. The answer according to Plato:

Plato’s answer to this is that “They will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a noble lie. The noble lie will inform them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege, they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.”

Jay Rosen is a teacher of journalism at the New York University, some months ago he started a project called NewAssignment.net. The project is financially supported by Reuters and investigates what new forms of journalism look like and how they behave. Watch a video-interview with Jay Rosen in which he explains some of his thoughts on the so called citizen journalism and newassignment.net.

Hungry for more on everything participatory or collaborative I recommend The Wealth of Nations, entirely downloadable as PDF (guess the free doesn’t make it easier to read 527 pages on-screen).